SaaS

The WAN optimization market is expected to more than double in size from 2014 to 2019 eventually hitting $12.1 billion according to MarketsandMarkets. It’s no wonder - Cyril Doussau de Bazignan explained to me in a recent meeting that as more companies adopt SaaS, they have the challenge of ensuring critical applications have adequate performance at the expense of applications which are secondary in importance.

Cyril works at InfoVista, a leading provider of IP and RF planning, assurance and optimization software solutions and they recently acquired WAN optimization and application performance leader Ipanema Technologies. He went on to say CIOs have to deal with the challenges of a multitude of applications running on their network while at the same time, enterprises are looking to offload more traffic to the internet to save money.

Amazon has made its name in ecommerce and cloud but its next frontier may be productivity applications and in the process, they may disrupt the entire enterprise software and cloud market. Zocalo is a new service from the company which allows the sharing of numerous document types with full version reviewed support and the ability to store files in specific geographical locations for compliance reasons. It works across devices (pretty much all of them), continents (files can be stored in the US and Europe (Ireleand) as of today) and can communicate with Active Directory if required. File transfers are encrypted and documents can be shared internally and externally.

The following diagram is borrowed from the substantial cranial database of TMC partner in WebRTC Expo and UC University, Phil Edholm who was a major tech driver at Nortel and Avaya for decades. It was modified a bit by me.

The state of the PBX market can be summed up by this chart showing existing vendors getting squeezed between Microsoft coming from the OS down, Cisco coming from the router out and cloud and open-source coming from the bottom up in terms of pricing. In short, it is a tough time to be a PBX vendor.

The traditional telco is dead – the case for moving to COTS technology is just too compelling. This is a theme I have been espousing for over a year. My readers further know companies like Metaswitch Networks have also been making the case as to why carriers need to start evaluating their software options immediately.

You also know about the cost savings associated with moving to standard servers – power and maintenance savings are a few additional benefits.

“Marketing is eating sales,” said Barry O’Sullivan the new CEO of Altocloud, a company dedicated to producing solutions which can be used to create happier customers. Simply stated they have an analytics platform which integrates your contact center and marketing automation software in order to allow instant insight on what your customers are doing and more importantly, helping them receive increasingly personalized experiences with smarter interactions and faster resolution.

And having Barry on board carries a great deal of importance. He not only was a VP/GM at Nortel when the company was doing well, he also spent 11 years at Cisco, most recently as SVP & GM UC & VoIP.

There has been lots of controversy over the merging of two of the largest cable companies Comcast and Time Warner Cable. Concerns range from fear of a monopoly to worse customer service to higher fees and data caps. Jim Edwards at Business Insider for example says you will get screwed if the merger goes through.

Consumers Union thinks if the merger happens, prices will increase and service will suffer.

Cloud-based contact center solutions have been priced fairly uniformly in the past… You pay per seat and feature. You want to add more people or features such as analytics, etc. and you pay more. Some vendors offer an all-inclusive solution of course meaning the only variable is the number of seats but regardless, the model has been fairly static for the past few decades – starting back in the nineties when the term ASP was what we used to describe the space.

Jared Headley who heads up Cisco’s service provider mobility marketing said to me recently, “We still believe the best way to simplify service delivery is to virtualize it, put it on COTS and really drive virtualized service chaining instead of physical plug-in router blade chaining for delivering services across the mobile network.” He continued to say this will drive costs down 40-45% in the first year while changing service delivery speed from months to weeks. He called this a revolution over the next couple of years.

He went on to say although this is generally considered “boring” stuff because it is back-end related but he emphasized this is what makes operators more agile.

I’ve had a few conversations recently with analysts and resellers about how Microsoft Lync is getting trials in many of the largest global corporations and this has traditional telecom equipment providers getting nervous. From these discussions you might surmise that the future of telecom is going to be dominated by Redmond. We know however there is also a major competing force in the market… Cloud-based services. Moreover, Microsoft’s dominance as an operating system seems to be coming to an end due to the onslaught of Android, iOS and Chromebooks.

These are very dark days for people who work for many divisions of Microsoft as tablets and smartphones have absolutely decimated the PC market as evidenced by a decline of 14% in sales of PCs last quarter. This news comes on the heels of the Windows 8 launch, the new OS which fuses the best of the tablet and Windows experience in one platform. The only problem is the new OS with all its marketing and slick new form factors isn’t cutting it, as consumers gravitate towards smaller screen devices.

Expect many calls for Steve Ballmer to be fired and when you consider how many markets Redmond has squandered since 2000 you could make a solid case for pushing him out.